FIC: "Behind the Music" 2/2

[soundczech]

Kame enrols in Jin’s school. Jin is in his third and final year of high school, doing his best to coast toward graduation without crashing. He promised his mother he would get that high school diploma, and then he can do whatever he likes.

Kame is a first year. Jin has no idea how he gained admission to the school; it’s not one of the fancy private schools full of brainiacs, or anything, but Kame hasn’t been to school since he was thirteen years old. Jin thinks his father might have pulled some strings, but he has no idea where, or how. Jin’s father occupies a murky world full of guys who owe him a favour. Jin wonders what favours the principal owes him.

It’s weird, because Jin has always seen Kame as being so much smarter than him, but he really struggles with schoolwork. Some nights they sit in Jin’s room, huddled over his desk, and Jin tries to help him with his homework, but it becomes clear that Kame has missed too much and needs the kind of help that Jin just isn’t smart enough to give.

Cram school is expensive - Jin’s parents wouldn’t have been able to afford to send Jin, even if Jin had had the inclination to go - so Jin’s mother arranges for their upstairs neighbour to help Kame out three days a week, in return for help with her chores. She’s an old lady who used to be a substitute teacher. She’s always giving Jin dried fruit when she sees him in the hall.

At first, Jin is pleased that Kame is going to get the help he needs, but it quickly becomes clear that the help he needs is going to take up all the time that he used to spend with Jin. Three days a week becomes five, and he comes home from Ishida-san’s tutorial sessions tired and a bit cranky. Kame does not like to be bad at things, and it seems he is bad at almost everything school-related. He looks miserably at Jin whenever he hesitantly enquires after his progress, then pulls out an exercise book and starts revising his notes.

“I wish I wasn’t so dumb,” he says, lying on his back on his futon, gazing up at the book he’s holding up over his head.

“You’re not dumb,” Jin says. “You’ve just got a lot of catching up to do.”

Kame sighs. “It’s so boring, though. I just want to catch up already so I can move on to something more interesting.”

“Hang in there,” Jin says. “If I can pass, anyone can, right?”

In the afternoons, Jin plays at the station alone.

-

On Sundays, Ishida visits her daughter’s family for lunch and Jin gets Kame to himself for the whole day. They sit around Jin’s room, Kame lying on his back with his eyes closed and barking out criticisms of the songs Jin is composing; the tempo is too slow or the notes are too flat, the lyrics are vapid, he’s singing like a woman or not singing enough like a woman. Jin would be offended except that Kame seems to have taken it as a complete matter of solid, reliable fact that Jin’s songs are good enough that they are going to make them famous. That Jin is good enough to make them famous.

Jin’s noticed that since moving in, Kame has become kind of bratty; not with Jin’s parents, or with Reio, of course. With them he is a well behaved darling. Jin’s mother’s perfect new son. He says please and thank you and tells her every meal is delicious. He let her cut his hair a bit so that he looked neat and presentable, a little angel carved out of the wild haired boy he had been.

With Jin, he’s more like a spoiled toddler; sometimes rude or abrupt, but mostly just demanding - just demanding Jin’s time or attention, half of his Snickers bar or coffee. Sometimes just demanding that Jin do his best. Jin doesn’t mind. This is a side of himself that only Jin is trustworthy enough to see.

“What are we going to name our band?” Kame asks one day. He’s wearing one of Jin’s old t-shirts. A few days after he moved in Jin went through his clothes and gave Kame everything that didn’t fit him right anymore or that he doesn’t really wear; a few things that he just thought would look good on him. He gave Kame his old prized leather jacket that has become too narrow in the shoulders and Kame wears it all the time, the same way Jin used to. It’s weird to see Kame in his clothes, but kind of nice.

“I don’t know,” Jin says. “Something awesome, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Kame says. He picks up the big stuffed dinosaur Jin has had forever and makes it dance on his lap. “But what??”

Jin hits a few keys on his keyboard, listening to the notes. “HELL RANGERS...” he says after a minute, scowling when Kame rolls his eyes and says, “Lame.”

“You think of something, then,” Jin huffs.

Kame flops back on the bed. The dinosaur is still dancing, bouncing from leg to leg on Kame’s flat stomach. “I can’t think of anything,” Kame says after a while. “I’m not good at this stuff.”

“Me either,” Jin admits. He picks up his English dictionary and lies down on the bed next to Kame, propped up on his elbows. “I’m going to choose two words in here at random, and no matter what, that’s our name, ok?”

Kame looks skeptical, but agrees anyway. He rolls onto his side and props his head up on his hand, waiting. His knees rub against Jin’s thigh.

“PORCUPINE...” Jin says, then flips to a different page. “MAVERICK...”

Kame purses his lips. “I don’t know what either of those words mean,” he says, “but they both sound stupid.”

Jin sighs and tries again. “TOWELLING BLAB,” he says.

“Oricon Chart toppers TOWELLING BLAB,” Kame says. “I don’t see it.”

Jin makes a face and turns the page. “DANCE PIRATE.”

“DANCE PIRATE,” Kame repeats. “That could work.”

“Worldwide chart toppers DANCE PIRATE,” Jin says.

“DANCE PIRATE sold out show,” Kame says.

“DANCE PIRATE triple platinum,” Jin giggles.

“Grammy award winners DANCE PIRATE,” Kame says.

Jin hugs his dictionary to his chest. “We’re gonna be filthy rich.”

-

Kame settles into life with the Akanishi family fairly easily, until it becomes difficult for Jin to remember that there was ever a time when he woke up in the morning and looked down at the floor and just saw tatami, rather than Kame sleeping on the futon, his unruly hair sticking out over the blankets.

A few months pass, and Jin notices that Kame has grown a bit; a bit taller, a bit broader, quite a bit more handsome. Jin’s mother’s cooking has filled in the ugly crevices where his bones used to jut out with smooth, healthy flesh; you can now only see the faint outline of ribs when he takes his shirt off. His frail wrists have become thick and competent. Jin stares at them whenever Kame plays his guitar.

It becomes clear that Kame has made friends in school, a development by which Jin is alternately thrilled and infuriated. The theory of it is fine; Kame making friends with some slightly nerdish classmates, just because they are sitting next to him in class and it would be boring to sit through all your classes alone.

The actuality is harder to deal with; a group of good looking young kids - some GIRLS even - who stroll out of class giggling and too familiar. They stare at Jin reverently when he meets Kame by the school gates; if they speak to him, they address him as “Akanishi-senpai” with slightly hushed voices. Kame just calls him “Jin”.

Every day, they ask Kame to go some place with them, usually to karaoke or a game centre, occasionally to go shopping in one of the fancy, trendy districts nearby. Kame always says no, because he has tutoring. Jin always wonders what he would say if he didn’t have tutoring; if he would go with them or if he would choose to stick with Jin and go play golden oldies for strangers at the train station. Jin likes to think Kame would choose him. He’s pretty sure. Sometimes, he looks at their shiny, happy faces and wonders if going to karaoke with them for a few hours would help Kame to forget everything in a way that hanging out with Jin, with that intense intimacy that seems to be growing up around them, can never do.

It’s a moot point anyway. The way things are going, Kame’s going to be going to those tutor sessions for the rest of their natural lives.

-

They are sitting on the floor in Jin's bedroom watching some stupid variety show when stupid Yamashita Tomohisa comes on. He is standing with Takizawa and talking about his stupid group's upcoming concerts. Jin thinks he has a dumb, ugly face.

"I auditioned," Jin blurts out. "For Johnny's."

Kame cracks up. "You did not," he says. "No way."

"I did!" Jin insists. "When I was fourteen! They said I wasn't obedient enough." He gets up and takes a box out of the cupboard, scrambling through it to get to the bottom. He takes out a little piece of laminated card and gives it to Kame. "Look, I stole their number plate."

Kame stares down at it; it is yellow and about the size of a CD. The number 76 is printed on it in a thick, cartoonish font. The Johnny's Jr logo is stamped on the bottom in red.

"Is this why you hate Johnnys?" Kame asks. He indicates the wall behind them, Jin's gallery of posters torn out of his ex-girlfriend's Myojo and then defaced; every now and again, when he's in a really bad mood, he'll get us and add another bushy eyebrow or pustulating zit to some ugly kid's face with a permanent marker.

"I hate them because they're so lame," Jin insists.

Kame just smiles and says, "We'll make them regret the day they ever rejected Akanishi Jin."

-

Jin finishes school without much fanfare; he barely passed most of his classes and didn't even try to get into university. He takes a job working at a trendy Harajuku clothing store, where the manager always positions him close to the entrance where he can lure in the girls with his pretty face.

The job makes it hard to keep busking in the afternoons, because he is now one of those suckers commuting home during the evening rush. He usually arrives home at about seven o'clock, just in time to meet Kame on his way downstairs from his tutoring.

Their fangirls have noticed their absence and have started leaving little tributes to them in the space where they used to play. Jin passes them on his way home from worm; tiny wreathes with grainy paparazzi style photos laminated in the centre; their names and the dates and 'live together, die together' scrawled on the bottom in wavering red ink. Jin gets the feeling the girls think they died in some kind of romantic suicide pact.

He almost doesn't want to disappoint them with the knowledge that he is alive, just working a dead end 9 to 6 job that would be unbearable if not for all the awesome free clothes he gets.

When he finally shows up to play again, it is a Sunday and he and Kame do a low key set to try out some of the new songs they have been writing; mostly low key ballads about love and loss and perseverence, more Kame's style than Jin's own.

They have been talking this whole time about being awesome and getting famous, but that day is the first time that Jin really knows it is true. While they play a kind of momentous hush falls over the half dozen or so people that have gathered around them; it takes a beat or two for the applause to start, a shocked silence as if people can't really believe what they have heard.

Yoshida-san, who runs the newsstand nearby and has been watching over Jin since he first started playing here as a scrawny, stupid kid, has tears in her eyes. She drops a few coins in their collection plate and says, "You boys."

Jin bows deeply and says, "Thank you for looking after us."

She blushes deeply and says it again. "You boys."

-

Kame shows up at home one day a few hours later than Jin expects him with neatly brushed hair and skin pink and tender looking where his eyebrows have been plucked to within an inch of their lives. The difference in his face is striking; smooth, high cheekbones rising up and his eyes suddenly popping sparkling and dark. He blushes and tries to shield his brow with his hands when Jin grabs his face and tries to hold him still to examine him in the light.

"I got a job," he says. "They did this to me."

"A job WHERE?" Jin asks, trying not to let the whine he feels in his chest spill out too obviously; the only time Kame has in which to get a job is the time he usually spends with Jin.

Kame mumbles his response and Jin has to ask him to repeat himself.

"A schoolboy cafe," Kame huffs. He crosses his arms and lifts his chin at the mixed incredulity and hilarity he must see on Jin's face. "It was the only place that would take me," he says defensively. "I can't freeload off your parents forever."

"Sure you can,” Jin says. “It’s better than prostituting yourself to old perverts!”

“I’m not a prostitute,” Kame hisses. “I’m not even a host! I’m basically just a glorified bus boy.”

“A bus boy in SCHOOLBOY COSPLAY,” Jin says, hilarity finally getting the better of him, giggles bursting forth.

“It’s not cosplay,” Kame says primly. “I am a schoolboy.”

“Do you have a persona?” Jin asks.

Kame scowls, but then suddenly his face changes and he looks up at Jin, all shy through his lashes. “C-can I take your plate, Akanishi-senpai?” he stutters, mouth slightly pouty and pursed. “Please?”

All the blood rushes out of Jin’s brain and he chokes, “Jesus.”

“Yeah,” Kame says darkly, obviously misinterpreting the source of Jin’s reticence. “Anyway, I start on Monday.”

-

Kame works almost every night, usually late into the night, much to Jin’s mother’s - and Jin’s - consternation. It gets to the point where Jin only sees Kame for a few minutes a day, their brief passing in the kitchen in the mornings and the moment when Kame crawls into bed at night and Jin lifts his head to murmur a sleepy, “Okaeri.”

Jin is forced to find ways to fill his time; he starts going out to the clubs in Roppongi with a few of his better-looking coworkers. He loves clubbing; dark rooms with bright lights, foreigners in skimpy clothing and beer so cold and frothy it burns his throat. He loves doing shots with strangers, ending up dancing close and sweaty, grinding skin on skin. More than anything, he loves to dance.

Sometimes, he’ll pick up a girl and go back to her place and fool around a little bit. It never goes much further than that; he sleeps with a couple of them and in the moment it is so hot and so worth it, but he feels strangely violated after. In the sticky moments afterwards he pulls on his clothes and slips out the door with a muttered excuse, thinking, mostly, about how this is a secret he can never share with Kame. It’s not worth the trauma to sleep with them, but sometimes he can get away with a blowjob with only the slightest feelings of guilt.

One night, he is pursued by an aggressive guy fresh off the plane from Los Angeles; he resists, at first, but finds himself in the guy’s hotel room after hours of vodka and dancing. His name is Jason and he has brown hair and green eyes. He pushes Jin down on the bed and kisses him without even showering first, and it’s kind of awkward and uncomfortable until Jin thinks, Is this what it would be like with Kame?

At that thought, he surges against him, hands in his hair, feeling hotter and more needy all of a sudden. It’s the best sex he has ever had, but later he can’t even remember what Jason looks like.

-

Sundays are their day. Jin typically crawls out of bed around noon, grumpy and hungover, and sits at the table while Kame finishes up his homework. Sometimes Kame gets sick of waiting for him and comes in and wakes him up with a mug of coffee, holding it out of his reach until Jin give in and sits up, usually slumped against Kame’s shoulder.

Sometimes they just sit around the house, playing music or cards, but often Jin will borrow his father’s car and drive them out of the city, into the mountains or to a long, flat stretch of beach. Jin likes to sing off the side of the mountain and hear his voice echoing in the canyon below. Kame likes to wade into the water with his jeans rolled up, not stopping until the waves are lapping at his knees. He’ll stand and stare at Jin until Jin wades out to meet him, and they’ll scream their frustrations to the sea.

Sometimes, in those moments, Jin considers kissing him. He’ll look at him askance and see the adult lines forcing themselves out onto Kame’s boyish face and think, I’m going to, but then he’ll remember that Kame is family, now. That if he fucks this up the way he fucks everything up, then he is basically destroying the only family that Kame has ever known.

He loves him too much to ever see that happen.

-

Jin meets Pi on a Thursday night. He’s somehow talked his way into the VIP section and Yamashita is sitting there surrounded by a group of laughing, glamourous boys. He looks bored, staring into his drink and fiddling with the straw. He smiles weakly when prompted by the squinty eyed one to his left. He looks different in real life, the lines of his face sharper and more tired. Something about him reminds Jin of Kame; the slight wariness with which they look at the world.

He sees him briefly, and then forgets about him, caught up in conversation with an American girl with long blonde hair who asks him questions in broken Japanese and laughs at his confused responses. Jin only remembers he is even there when he goes to order a drink and Yamashita slips in front of him, asking for a fancy European beer.

“Hey,” Jin protests, “No cutsies!”

Yamashita turns and blinks at him owlishly, seeming surprised that Jin was even standing there in the first place. “Excuse me?” he says after a full minute, as if he has been standing here trying to process the words Jin is saying but came up blank.

“You cut in line,” Jin says.

“I did not,” Yamashita says.

“YOU DID TOO,” Jin says, louder this time.

“I DID NOT,” Yamashita snaps.

Somehow, by the end of the night, they are the best of friends.

-

“Pi says that this season is all about asymmetrical lines,” Jin says. He is sitting in Kame’s cafe sipping a milkshake and telling him all about his encounter with The Yamashita Tomohisa. Jin had no idea he cared so much about fashion, but he’s been talking to Kame about it for about two hours now and doesn’t think he’ll stop any time soon. Kame is only half listening to him, hmming appreciatively at the right intervals as he moves around the tables, gathering the women’s plates and flirting a little as he goes. Whenever he looks into some old woman’s eyes and she giggles Jin feels like reaching out and pushing her face into her strawberry cream tart.

“He says if I cut my hair shorter on this side it would make my cheekbones pop more,” Jin says. “What do you think? He’s sooo much better looking in real life, you barely notice his googly eyes at all.”

Kame turns around just in time for Jin to see him make a face, so he says, “What?”

Kame shrugs and goes back to stacking the dishes on the counter for the dishwasher to come pick them up and take them into the kitchen.

“Seriously,” Jin says, feeling, suddenly, hot under the collar. “What?”

Kame has a pissy, shrivelled kind of look about the face that Jin rarely sees on him. He looks tightly wound, like all Jin has to do is poke at the right strings and he will explode.

“You’ve been talking about Yamashita for hours,” Kame says. That’s unfair; Jin’s only been in here about forty five minutes, and he hadn’t talked about him for all of that time. Just most of it.

“So?” Jin says.

“So maybe I’m sick of hearing about fucking Yamashita,” Kame says.

Jin storms out. Tomorrow is Sunday; Jin stays out all night and doesn’t come home until almost Monday morning.

-

Jin meets YamaPi for lunch on Wednesday afternoon, in a izakaya about halfway between their respective workplaces. They have to make it quick; Yamashita has to be back for a photoshoot in thirty minutes, and the t-shirts in Jin’s store won’t fold themselves.

Jin tells Pi about Kame’s outburst.

“It was so dumb,” Jin says. He shovels a piece of katsu in his mouth and talks through it. “I don’t know why he was acting like that.”

Pi shrugs. “Maybe he was jealous,” he says. He’s got about five different dishes spread out around him, but he’s only taking bits and pieces from each.

“What, that I met the famous Yamashita Tomohisa and he didn’t?” Jin asks. “Kame’s not that lame.”

Pi rolls his eyes. “Not that you met me,” he says. “That I met you.”

Jin blinks at him. “Why would that matter?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” Pi says. “People are weird.”

-

Jin thinks about it all day while carefully folding jeans and counting out the change for the kids that come into the store. It has never really occurred to Jin that maybe Kame is as insane about Jin as he is about Kame; Kame tends to keep all his worst neuroses bottled up until they spill out uncontrolled and Jin finds out he’s a homeless orphan who ran away from a sadistic foster parent. Sometimes Jin forgets how messed up he really is inside because when he looks into Jin’s eyes he is stable and strong; he is the one dragging Jin forward, the one keeping them both afloat.

It’s weird for Jin to remember that he’s just a kid like Jin.

Jin tries to think about what he would do if Kame suddenly came into the store one afternoon and said he’d met some guy - not just some guy, Yamashita Tomohisa for fuck’s sake - and then proceeded to talk about how awesome he was for forty five minutes without break. Jin would like to give himself some credit for maturity, but he can’t. He’d have a shit fit. He’d probably have only lasted about three minutes before he had a shit fit, actually.

Well, fuck.

-

Jin goes home early that night so he can be there when Kame gets there. Kame does a double take in the doorway of the bedroom when he gets there; Jin is already lying in bed, doodling in a notepad. He has about five pages of possible logos for DANCE PIRATE.

“You’re not going out tonight?” Kame asks, pulling off the tie of his schoolboy uniform. It’s not the same as his regular uniform; the cafe has a make believe school dress code. He looks tired.

“Nah,” Jin says. “I didn’t feel like it.”

“Because Yamashita’s not gonna be there?” Kame snipes, and Jin can see his cheeks turning pink even as he says it.

“I don’t know if he’s gonna be there,” Jin says. “I wanted to be here.” He holds out the sketchbook to Kame. “Look.”

Kame takes it, looking at him quizzically. He flips through the pages, smile growing shyly on his face. “Don’t give up your day job,” he says, but a few days later Jin sees that he has doodled one of the logos in the margins of his homework. It is a skull and crossbones with hearts for eyes. They will use that logo for the rest of their lives.

-

They play a show in the square not long before Christmas; they actually advertise it this time, putting up fliers around town their their photos and their logo, DANCE PIRATE written in huge, angular caps across the bottom. Their fans come back, and bring their friends. Groups of shoppers wander in, lured, people say later, by the photograph of the two handsome young men on the flier. It is the largest group they have ever assembled.

YamaPi comes. He stands in back in a hat with flaps for ears and a pair of expensive sunglasses. Later, he comes up to Jin and says, “That was really good!”

“Thanks,” Jin says with a broad smile. Kame bows slightly and stiffly; he’s met YamaPi two or three times but has yet to relax around him. Later, he’s always more clingy than usual, shadowing Jin all evening when he would usually wander off and do his own thing. Jin should probably put a stop to it, but honestly he kind of likes it.

“Seriously,” Pi says. “I was trying to think of ways to politely avoid telling you you suck on the way over here, but that was actually good!”

“Yeah,” Jin says. “We’re awesome.”

“I’m shocked,” Pi says, pressing his fists to his cheeks. “I thought you were going to be terrible.”

“Does this mean you’re my fan now?” Jin asks, only half joking. “Do you want my autograph?”

“No way,” Pi says, punching him on the arm and throwing his arm over Kame’s shoulders. Jin sees Kame freeze with surprise. “I’m Kamenashi-chan’s fan. Kawaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiii.”

“Hey,” Jin says. “Fuck you, I’m adorable.”

“It’s alright,” Kame says, wriggling out from under Pi’s arm. “I’ll always be Jin’s fan.”

“Yeah,” Jin says, yanking on Kame’s arm til he’s tucked at Jin’s side. “So there.”

Pi just snickers and treats them yakiniku to celebrate; when they count up the money in Jin’s fedora they have made just enough to buy Jin’s mother a pearl necklace for Christmas.

-

At the end of his second year of high school, Kame’s grades have picked up and they’re now actually better than Jin’s; he has a B-minus average with a few C+’ and A’s scattered throughout. He brings home a history essay about Oda Nobunaga with an A+ written on the front in big red pen. Jin’s mother proudly sticks it on the fridge with a Doraemon magnet. She ruffles Kame’s hair and kisses his cheek and says, “My little genius!”

“See?” Jin says as she goes into the other room. He bites into an apple and chews it obnoxiously while talking. “I told you you’re not dumb.”

“It’s just an essay,” Kame says, eyes down.

“Shut up,” Jin says. “I don’t think I ever got an A+ in my life.” He crosses the kitchen and pokes Kame in the arm. “Let me be vicariously smug.”

Kame looks up at him and grins a bit shyly. Jin remembers him saying, “Akanishi-senpai, please?” and he can’t help it, he leans over and kisses him, a smacking, moist kiss.

“Congratulations,” he murmurs into the side of Kame’s mouth, and then he’s out of there, only stopping long enough to pull his jacket on as he hurries out the door.

-

Neither of them mention the kiss later, though Jin thinks about it all the time. He remembers the way Kame’s eyebrows had lifted and his eyes had closed; how he’d blinked at Jin afterwards, as if unsure where he was. Jin thinks about it in the shower, in the train, at work while he’s writing mark downs on the price tags of t-shirts. He thinks about it lying in bed at night and while he’s chugging shots at the club. He thinks about it while writing songs and eating dinner.

He thinks about it pretty much full time.

-

They celebrate Kame’s eighteenth birthday by driving up to the beach on a Friday night; they check into a ryokan and spend two days wandering the small coastal city, stuffing themselves with expensive seafood. It’s too cold to swim so they get massages and go to the onsen, where they float boneless and dizzy in the steaming water.

They sleep side by side on futons, close enough to reach out and touch. Jin fantasises about reaching out and pulling Kame out of his futon and into his own. Wrapping him up in Jin’s blankets and not letting him go.

On Sunday afternoon, when they get in the car to drive home, Kame clips his seatbelt into place and says to Jin, “You saved my life, you know.”

-

Kame starts acting a bit weird, and Jin thinks that he has finally started reacting to Jin’s clumsy, embarrassing kiss; he is on school holidays, so he should have plenty of time to come and hang around at Jin’s store in the mornings before he starts work in the afternoons, but he doesn’t. He sleeps in when Jin gets up for work and has already gone to bed when Jin gets home from Roppongi. Sometimes, Jin will turn the lights on and make a lot of noise, trying to wake Kame up so they can maybe go eat a midnight snack and watch a stupid American sitcom before Jin goes to sleep. A few times, he ‘accidentally’ trips over Kame’s leg’s on his way to the bed. Kame stays stubbornly, resolutely asleep, almost as if he’s faking.

Jin misses him.

He starts to text Kame a lot, at random moments throughout the day; Kame doesn’t really use his phone much, because he’s never gotten used to having one, but he replies to all Jin’s messages anyway. Sometimes he doesn’t say much, just responds to Jin’s questions with a yes or no answer. After a few days he seems to find the emoji function on his phone and embraces it to the point that Jin kind of wants to kill him; sometimes he doesn’t even bother responding with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’, just sends back a row of thumbs up.

Reply properly he sends, but all he gets back is a big red question mark.

-

Jin comes home from about a week into Kame’s school holidays and finds a note from Kame on top of his keyboard. It is written on a piece of notepaper hastily torn from one of Kame’s exercise books. Jin can till see bits of equations written on the torn side of the paper.

Gone to see my brother in Okinawa.

I’ll call you

Don’t worry

Kame

He stares down at it, hand shaking; reads it three times, then explodes, “MUUUUUUM!”

He dashes into the kitchen, where she is calmly folding wonton wrappers into gyoza. “He’ll be back, Jin.”

“You KNEW about this?” he asks. The note is totally scrunched in his hand. “Why didn’t I know about this?”

“I suppose he thought you might react badly,” she says dryly.

“What does he MEAN he’s gone to see his BROTHER?” Jin asks. He’s not even sure what he’s upset about exactly; he’s aware that he should probably see this as good news, but everything has suddenly changed really quickly and he’s not sure how to react. He feels like he’s blown a fuse.

“He got a letter in the mail from his brother two or three days ago,” she says. “Calm down, honey. Come here, sit down and have some tea.” She ushers him over to the table and pours him a cup of tea from the pot that was gently steaming on the counter.

“Don’t tell me to calm down,” Jin protests weakly.

“Jin, really, there’s no need to be so dramatic,” she says. “He’ll be back.”

Jin stares glumly into his cup of tea. He doesn’t believe her at all.

-

Kame calls him about half an hour later, moments after he has stepped off the plane. He’s sitting in the airport terminal waiting for his brother to pick him up; the tension coiled in his voice makes Jin’s tummy jerk. Jin hasn’t really seen him for a couple of days, which is the only way he could have hidden that slightly hysterical note from him.

“You didn’t tell me you were going,” Jin says. He’s sitting on his bed staring at the pile of Kame’s stuff folded neatly on the end of the desk; three of four of his t-shirts, a pair of jeans, some balled up socks. The leather jacket Jin gave him is nowhere to be seen.

“I couldn’t,” Kame says. “I don’t know why. I’m sorry.”

Kame tells him that he got a letter from Kamenashi Yuichiro in the mail a few days ago, only his name is now Oda Yuichiro. He had been adopted as a small boy by a couple whose family owned a hospital in Okinawa; they are both doctors and are, from what Kame can tell from Googling their names, filthy rich. Yuichiro is in medical school, studying to be a trauma surgeon. He hired a private detective to find his missing brother Kazuya; he had been looking for years with no luck, until his name had turned up on the school records at a high school in suburban Tokyo. He’d sent Kame a boarding pass for a flight that was leaving today, all expenses paid. Please come, he’d said. Please.

Jin is silent when Kame finishes, until Kame says, “Jin? Are you mad?”

Jin is sitting on the bed with his head resting in his hand; the headache that had started out as a nuzzling tentacle at the back of his neck has become thick and overgrown, twining around his temple and yanking tight. “No,” he says finally.

“Yes you are,” Kame says.

“I’m just worried,” Jin says. “I wish I could have gone with you.”

“I had to do this on my own,” Kame says. “You understand that, right?”

“Yeah,” Jin says, but he doesn’t, at all.

“I’m so nervous,” Kame says. Jin imagines him sitting in the airport in Okinawa with the suitcase he must have borrowed from Jin’s father, hunched over and biting a bit at his cuticles. “What if he doesn’t like me?”

“What’s not to like?” Jin asks.

Kame snorts. “I don’t know, according to most of my foster families, millions of things.”

“Not according to this family,” Jin says, feeling, suddenly, fiercely loyal and protective. If this stupid brother doesn’t give Kame the family he has dreamed of and more, Jin is going to fly to Okinawa and kill him. Really, literally, kill him.

“Thanks,” Kame says. “I should go. I’ll see you when I get back.”

“Good luck,” Jin says, but what he thinks is, you’re not coming back.

-

A few hours later, Kame sends a photo to his phone; his face pressed up against an imperfect replica of himself; quite a few years older and not quite so pretty, with bushier eyebrows and darker hair. They are grinning and throwing peace signs for the camera. Jin keeps taking out his phone to look at the picture; the naked, unbridled joy in Kame’s eyes.

He falls asleep staring at it, wondering how it’s possible for him to feel so happy and so miserable all at once.

-

Kame calls him again first thing in the morning, when Jin is on his way to work, walking down the street with his satchel and take away coffee. He gushes about his brother and his adoptive parents and how beautiful their estate is, high up on a cliff overlooking the Okinawan coastline. Jin listens to him talk and closes his eyes and thinks, iloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyou but it seems horribly, cruelly too late to tell him now, when he’s just found the thing he has been searching for all his life.

-

Jin goes out with some of Yamapi’s idol friends; a big group, all of them with precision cut hair and pointy crocodile skin shoes. There’s one kid that doesn’t really fit in, a bit older and a bit more awkward than the others. He’s got a big nose and hair that looks like a wig, but he laughs at all Jin’s dumb jokes and lets Jin bully him all evening. He and Jin sit in the corner of the room all evening making fun of the others.

“You don’t seem like a Johnny,” Jin says. “No offense.”

“Yeah, thanks,” the kid says. His name is Nakamaru Yuichi. “I think they keep me around for comic relief.”

“You’d rather look like that?” Jin asks, gesturing towards a kid in white satin pants who is loitering by the bar awkwardly, looking like he wants Pi to notice him. His name is Shigeako or something. “At least your pants aren’t shiny.”

Nakamaru snickers into his beer.

Jin ends up telling him, in drunken, general terms, about the situation with Kame, only in this scenario Kame is a hot girl called Kazumi who ran off with a hot doctor, rather than Kazuya, his hot sort of foster brother who ran off with his biological brother. Somewhere in the middle, though, the two stories get confused and Jin just tells him everything, while Nakamaru sits there with a kind of stunned, awkward flare to his nostrils.

Jin falls asleep on his shoulder, cheek pressed up against his white argyle sweater.

“Thanks, Nakamura,” he murmurs sleepily.

-

Kame calls on Sunday afternoon when Jin is curled up under the covers, cuddling an icepack to his head. He feels dehydrated and distraught. He’s covered in bruises, but he doesn’t know where any of them came from. “Hi,” he says with a croaky voice; he went to karaoke with the Johnny’s in the middle of the night, and he seems to have been singing his heart out.

“Hey,” Kame says. “Big night?”

“No,” Jin says, defensively. Sometimes when he comes home really late or really drunk Kame gets this look in his eyes, like Jin is about two years old and needs someone to watch over him at all times.

Kame chatters about Okinawa for a while and Jin closes his eyes and tries to go back to sleep, because the truth is, he hates stupid Okinawa and its stupid beaches and shisa and sole-surviving-relatives. He hates pork and sea urchin and bitter melon. He hates stupid Oda Yuichiro.

After a while, Kame runs out of steam and asks, “Did you fall asleep?”

“No,” Jin says.

Kame is quiet for a minute; Jin realises he can hear the roar of the ocean in the background. He imagines Kame sitting on the beach, barefoot with his toes in the sand. He thinks of the way Kame’s calves look when he’s got his jeans rolled up; his hairy, scrawny legs.

“Yuichiro wants me to stay,” he says, “for a while.”

Of course he does, Jin thinks. “Mm,” he says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

“I don’t know if I will,” Kame says.

You will, Jin thinks. Of course you will.

-

Jin gets a call from a management company on a totally normal Tuesday morning. He is folding t-shirts one moment and listening to a voicemail from some guy called Sanada-san the next, phone pressed between his shoulder and his ear as he juggles with the t-shirts.

Sanada-san sounds crisp and businesslike, addressing Jin in formal language and leaving his number so Jin can call him back.

Yamashita-kun told him about DANCE PIRATE, he says. He wants them to come in and play for them.

Jin debates calling Kame for a little while, taking out his phone and staring at the photo of Kame with his grinning face pressed up against Yuichiro’s. He thinks of Kame’s voice on the phone, the happiness as he’d blabbed on and on about how nice Yuichiro is, how smart. The memory of his voice in the dark in Jin’s room, almost two years ago now, telling Jin about how his family had died.

Jin goes to the audition alone.

-

He expects it to be a fancy office full of gleaming marble and stainless steel, but it kind of looks like any other office; long off-white walls and speckled grey carpet, a row of red seats bolted to the wall. Jin sits in one and flicks through a magazine, snickering when he sees Yamapi posing stiffly with a bunch of gerberas.

There is a row of gold and platinum records on the wall by the reception desk, where a pretty young girl sits at a computer with perfectly styled hair and short, buffed nails. Jin looks at the records when he gets bored of the magazine. He sees a few bands he recognises, even a few he loves; he looks down the hall out of the corner of his eye, half expecting rockstars to swagger through the door at any minute. He’s disappointed when the door opens and the only person who comes through is a portly, aging gentleman in a navy suit. He looks like a nerd.

Jin starts to fidget; he twists the silver ring on his finger and tugs at the hood of his jacket, trying to make it sit flat. A pretty young woman comes out to get him and takes him to where Sanada-san is waiting in a small, plain room without windows. Sanada sits at a table in a black leather jacket and jeans; he looks like a tv detective.

He nods as Jin walks in and gestures to the centre of the room. He doesn’t say anything as Jin sets up his keyboard, or when Jin sits down and flicks on the power.

“Um,” Jin says. “Do I play?”

Sanada just rolls his eyes and nods. There’s a notebook in front of him and Jin can see that he’s already started scratching out notes in black pen. There’s a photo of Jin with Kame peeking out from underneath the notebook; Jin has no idea where he got it. He kind of wants to ask for a copy.

Jin closes his eyes, trying not to think about how if he fucks this up, he’s probably fucking up not only his entire life, but Kame’s too; about how he maybe jumped the gun by not calling Kame so he could be here for this audition; about how he doesn’t know when or if Kame will be back; about how fucking terrifying this moment is.

He just plays, heart in his fingers, dancing on the keys.

“I thought there were two of you,” Sanada says after. He’s got that photo out and he’s looking at it. He points at Kame with his pen. “Kamenashi?”

Jin holds his breath. “He couldn’t make it,” he says. “He’s away on family business.”

Sanada’s face is grim. He’s kind of scary. “You should call him back,” he says. “I think the three of us can do business together.”

-

Sanada says that Jin has a month to get Kame back to Tokyo, otherwise he will take Jin alone or not at all. Jin goes home and tries to decide what the mature, responsible thing to do would be; what Kame might do, if their situations were reversed. What Jin would want him to do.

He realises he’d be pretty angry if Kame went ahead without him. He imagines walking to a record store and seeing Kame’s face on posters without him; hearing Kame’s name on the radio or seeing him on tv. He kicks his trashcan over, a little enraged just at the thought.

Kame deserves the chance to choose, Jin thinks. He’s just got to learn to deal with the fact that Kame might not choose him.

-

Jin goes over to Pi’s house and they get totally wasted, bottles of beer lining up on the coffee table and spilling over until they are scattered on the floor around them.

“This whole thing is your fault,” Jin slurs. “You couldn’t have waited til Kame got back to tell Sanada about us?”

Pi snorts into his beer. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t remember telling him about you in the first place. I must have been out of my mind, who wants you to be a rockstar?”

“Everyone,” Jin says. “Kame.”

Yamapi giggles and pokes Jin’s cheek. Lately, he’s been gaining weight, muscles starting to poke out of his tiny, skinny frame. “Your head’s too big already, ne.”

“Shut up,” Jin says, knocking Pi’s hand away. “At least my face isn’t as fat as yours.”

That’s the last thing Jin remembers, but he must have called Kame; he wakes up the next day and his phone is lying open next to him, battery flat. He claws back pieces of his memory and forms a vague impression of Kame’s happy voice as he says hello growing steadily more confused and upset; he can’t remember what he said to him. He doesn’t know if he was rude or just confusing.

“Shit,” Jin groans, and buries his face in his pillow. He wonders if he should call Kame and apologise, but the thought of hearing Kame’s wounded voice makes him sicker than he already felt and he has to lurch to the bathroom to puke.

He texts Kame that night and says, Sorry, but Kame never replies.

-

A few days later Jin leaves the station just as it is getting dark, feet aching and shoulders tense. It’s been a long day; they were having a huge sale, so the store was full of demanding, stingy customers, calling out for him in their gangsta teenage slang. It’s only been a few years since Jin was in high school but even he has only the vaguest idea of what they’re talking about half the time.

He’s about to take the shortcut into the underpass that takes him out to the otherside of the square when he hears the twang of guitar strings floating down from the mouth of the stairs; a few moments later, a familiar voice, high and husky.

He takes the stairs two at a time.

It’s a song Jin has never heard before, with a simple, jangling melody like a jewellery box.

His heart thuds as Kame comes into view; the familiar, longed for hunch of his body over his guitar, his clumsy, skinny legs. He closes his eyes as he sings.

Just one step at a time; don't let go of my hand
The days we spent together still live
Even if we're torn apart til we're ragged
That time, that place, this bond won't disappear

There’s no-one else around; it’s like Kame knew, somehow, the exact moment that Jin would step off the train. There’s no-one there to see it when Jin pulls the guitar out of Kame’s arms and out of his reach; when he leans in and kisses him, properly, finally, one hand on the small of Kame’s back and bending him back until he swoons.

-

“How did you know to come back?” Jin asks. They’re sitting in a family restaurant sharing a parfait, Kame’s guitar and all his bags piled up on the empty seats at their table of four. It’s late; the only other people around are a group of salarymen with their foreign conversational English teacher.

“You don’t remember?” Kame replies. He gathers a hunk of strawberry and cream on his spoon and pops it in his mouth. “You called me raving about how we had to run to the stars to reach our dream, or something, and how some guy called Sanada is going to make us famous.”

“Oh,” Jin says. “Sanada. That’s our manager.”

“Yeah,” Kame says. “Then you told me you love me.”

Jin flushes beet red; he can literally feel the blood rushing to his cheeks and to the tips of his ears. “That’s romantic,” he says, stubbornly refusing to admit that he is embarrassed.

“Yeah,” Kame says, deadpan. “I was really swept off my feet.”

“Shut up,” Jin grumbles, ducking his head. “It got you here, didn’t it?”

Kame shrugs and scrapes at the bottom of the almost-empty parfait glass, trying to gather the last bits of chocolate on his spoon. “You should have just told me.”

Jin doesn’t say, I was afraid. He says, “It seemed like bad timing. With your brother and everything.”

“It’s not great timing,” Kame agrees. He licks the chocolate off his spoon, oblivious to Jin’s eyes on his soft, pink tongue. “Meeting Yuichiro is one of the greatest things that ever happened to me.”

“I know,” Jin says, looking down at his hands, where he is tearing strips off a napkin and tying them into tiny knots.

Kame touches his wrist. “Meeting you was the other.”

Kame doesn’t often talk like this, not about Jin, not to Jin’s face. He’s very sentimental in grand, abstract terms, talking about the beauty and courage of friendship in general, but he will rarely look at Jin and say anything that says, you are important to me. You matter to me. Jin supposes he thinks that it goes without saying.

It still feels really good to hear.

“I’ve got big dreams, Jin,” he says. “They’re not in Okinawa.”

Jin feels the knives that have been twisting in his side slowly melt away. He reaches out and takes Kame’s hand, laughing a little at the chipped black nailpolish. Kame is so lame sometimes. “#1 supergroup DANCE PIRATE,” Jin murmurs.

“It’s a promise,” Kame says.

“Cross your heart and hope to die?” Jin asks.

“Stick a needle in my eye,” Kame confirms, and leans over to pledge his fealty with a kiss.

-

Sanada-san books them a series of gigs at live houses around the city; at first the turnout is disappointing, but after the third or fourth half-empty room Pi updates his jweb about how they’re his new favourite band and the audience is suddenly full of screaming teenagers with a line out the door that goes down the street. The girls who have followed them from when they were babies with fuzzy eyebrows and mushroom-shaped hair playing Beatles covers in the square, they come and stand at the barrier and bully the other fans who haven’t been there since the beginning.

After their first packed out set, Jin drags Kame into the bathroom in the green room and ravishes him, leaving marks on his neck and on his hips where his fingers press just a little too hard. Kame grabs a fistful of his hair hard enough to hurt.

Later, there will be bad reviews and paparazzi and tabloid speculation, stalkers and screaming fits and brief flirtations with drug abuse, but this first moment - and so many moments later - is completely and uncompromisingly perfect.

The sound of the crowd screaming for an encore reaches Jin through the rushing of blood in his ears. He pulls away from Kame with a groan, licking his thumb to smooth down Kame’s eyebrows.

“Our screaming fans await,” Jin says, throwing up his fists in triumph as he walks out on the stage and they only scream louder.

Comments

[livesmiling.livejournal.com]

brb reading omg

[livesmiling.livejournal.com]

first? :)

this was wonderful, as usual. there is so much epic in this short two-part i can't even say. you always manage to get kame and jin's characters down so well, absolutely gorgeous bb.

[soundczech.livejournal.com]

thank you!!! i had to stuff a lot into the two parts because i started running out of time alksdj. i had to take so much out of my mental outline.